Monday, December 13:
Christmas bits and pieces and work. R. laughs at my being so exclusively occupied with all this. He constantly working, on Siegfried and Brünnhilde as well as his essay. In the afternoon geography with the student.
In the evening R. reads to me out of a volume of Heine, posthumous things. As always things of incomparable genius, but also very repulsive pieces. "He is the bad conscience of our whole era," R. says, "the most unedifying and demoralizing matters one can possibly imagine, and yet one feels closer to him than to the whole clique he is so naively exposing."